The Continent Rebuilt

At Harvard on 5 June 1947, the American secretary of state, George Marshall, offered support for a European recovery programme that Europeans would help frame themselves. The proposal addressed a material chain near collapse: farms lacked fertiliser and machinery, mines lacked timber and pumps, railways lacked rolling stock, and factories could not obtain the fuel or imported inputs needed to restart. Dollars mattered because European states had little foreign exchange with which to buy from the productive economy that the war had left intact across the Atlantic.

Sixteen European governments met in Paris to state their requirements together. The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, founded in 1948, compared national programmes and allocated scarce imports under the European Recovery Program. Ships unloaded wheat, coal, petroleum, industrial equipment, vehicles and machine tools. Governments sold many imported goods in local currency and used the resulting counterpart funds for reconstruction and investment. An American appropriation could therefore become a transformer, a repaired locomotive, an electrified workshop and another train of finished goods rather than a single transfer between treasuries.

The offer sharpened the continental division. The Soviet Union rejected the programme and compelled governments under its control to remain outside; Czechoslovakia withdrew after first accepting the Paris invitation. In the west, American aid accelerated recovery already being driven by European labour, policy and technical skill, while the requirement to compare plans made governments practise cooperation before they possessed permanent common institutions. The Atlantic had delivered protection and machinery. It had also given western Europe a room in which national needs could be entered on one sheet.

On 9 May 1950, the French foreign minister Robert Schuman read a proposal prepared through the work of Jean Monnet and a small planning team. France and West Germany would place their entire coal and steel production under a common High Authority in an organisation open to other European countries. The choice went to the centre of the old danger. Ruhr coal fed furnaces; steel armed states and built industrial power. Their control had produced occupation schemes, reparation disputes and recurrent fear between France and Germany.

Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany signed the Treaty of Paris in April 1951. The treaty entered into force in July 1952, and the High Authority began work with a Council representing governments, an Assembly and a Court. Common markets for coal opened in February 1953 and for steel in May. Published rules, inspectors, production returns, levy receipts and decisions made cooperation a sequence of ordinary administrative acts rather than an embrace between leaders.

National industries and national interests remained, but each government now pursued them inside a durable common arena. Every completed decision left an office, precedent and account for the next dispute. France acquired confidence that German recovery would occur within supervision; West Germany recovered equality through participation; the smaller states received seats inside the mechanism. Reconciliation had acquired machinery. The western road would now extend that method from two strategic materials into trade, movement and law.

In April 1974, junior officers ended Portugal’s dictatorship in the Carnation Revolution and opened a struggle over elections, empire, property and constitutional rule. Greece’s colonels fell that July after their regime helped provoke the Cyprus crisis; Konstantinos Karamanlis returned from exile to restore civilian government and legalise political competition. Francisco Franco died in November 1975, and Spain’s king, ministers, opposition parties, unions and voters moved through political reform, elections and the Constitution of 1978. Within three years, western Europe’s surviving southern dictatorships had given way to parliamentary states.

Each new democracy sought entry into the European Community. Greece applied in 1975 and joined in 1981. Portugal and Spain applied in 1977, negotiated changes to tariffs, agriculture, fisheries, regulation and public administration, and entered together on 1 January 1986. Membership required governments and parliaments to accept a body of common law and to resolve conflicts through negotiation, legislation and courts. Accession instruments gave domestic reformers a dated programme and placed abrupt reversals against obligations shared with other democracies.

Greek resistance, Portuguese soldiers and parties, and Spanish political actors recovered constitutional government within their own countries. Community entry gave their achievement a continental home and changed the meaning of enlargement. The organisation founded by six states around Franco-German reconciliation could admit different national histories without abandoning its legal form. Western integration now joined prosperity and peace to a visible political standard: European government would be competitive, constitutional and answerable to law.

Before dawn on 13 August 1961, East German police and work crews unrolled barbed wire through Berlin. Streets ended at barricades, railway services stopped and doors facing the sector boundary were watched. At Bernauer Strasse, the line ran along house fronts: residents escaped through windows while authorities bricked the openings and later demolished the buildings. Families who had crossed the city for work, worship or a Sunday visit found that an internal occupation boundary had become a closed frontier in a single night.

The German Democratic Republic called the barrier an anti-fascist protection wall. Its practical direction faced inward. Millions had left East Germany through the still-open Berlin route since the state’s creation, including young and trained workers whom the planned economy could not afford to lose. Barbed wire became concrete wall, guard towers, patrol roads, lights, signal fences and a controlled death strip. Border troops received orders and weapons to stop unauthorised departure; escape attempts became matters of surveillance, prison, injury and death.

The Wall stabilised the East German state by preventing a daily vote with one’s feet. It also made the eastern system’s weakness visible to every train and camera in West Berlin. Western institutions could attract members and applicants; Soviet Europe enclosed the route by which its own citizens were leaving. Concrete held the division for twenty-eight years, yet it could not command memory or conviction. Beneath official newspapers and party meetings, other records of Europe continued to pass through radio, literature, family speech and the knowledge that the streets on the far side still existed.

When the conclave elected the archbishop of Kraków on 16 October 1978, Karol Wojtyła became the first Polish pope and the first non-Italian pope in more than four centuries. He had worked under German occupation, entered a clandestine seminary and then served as priest and bishop under a government that claimed authority over Poland’s institutions and historical meaning. His election placed a Polish voice beyond the party’s power to appoint, dismiss or censor. Church bells, crowded streets and improvised celebrations registered a fact the state could manage but could not own.

John Paul II returned from 2 to 10 June 1979. The government negotiated every route and broadcast, hoping protocol would contain the visit. Instead, enormous congregations assembled in Warsaw, Gniezno, Częstochowa, Kraków and other stops through parish organisation, volunteer order and private travel. In Victory Square, beside the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he joined Christian faith to Poland’s historical endurance and human dignity. His final invocation asked the Spirit to renew ‘the face of this land’, giving the crowd a short sentence in which national memory and moral agency could be spoken together.

Poland’s opposition already possessed experience and networks. Workers had rebelled before; intellectuals in the Committee for the Defence of Workers were documenting repression and aiding families after the strikes of 1976; underground publications and parish communities kept independent thought in circulation. John Paul II changed the scale on which Poles could recognise those efforts. For nine days, millions stood together peacefully outside the party’s choreography and watched one another do it. The state retained police, factories and television. Society discovered that it possessed numbers, discipline and a source of authority the state could neither grant nor revoke.

Poles voted on 4 June 1989 under rules that reserved most Sejm seats for the communist governing bloc while opening the rest of the lower house and the new Senate to competition. Across the two rounds, Solidarity won every freely contested Sejm seat and ninety-nine of the hundred Senate seats. The result stripped the party of public authority even before the constitutional arrangement had caught up. By August, Tadeusz Mazowiecki headed the first non-communist-led government in the Soviet bloc. Poland had moved from strike gate to negotiating table to ballot without waiting for permission from another eastern capital.

Hungary’s reform government dismantled sections of the frontier barrier with Austria and, after the Pan-European Picnic near Sopron exposed the route in August, opened the border to East German refugees in September. Their departure intensified demonstrations at home. Leipzig’s Monday crowds demanded freedom to travel and then political change. On 9 November, Günter Schabowski announced confused new travel rules at an East Berlin press conference. Citizens gathered at the checkpoints; guards without clear orders yielded at Bornholmer Strasse, and the Wall opened under the pressure of people who had arrived expecting the announced right to be honoured.

Prague followed. After police attacked a student march on 17 November, theatres, universities and workplaces carried news and organisation across Czechoslovakia. Civic Forum gathered the opposition around Václav Havel; hundreds of thousands filled Wenceslas Square and shook keys as a demand to unlock public life. The Communist Party surrendered its monopoly, and Havel was elected president in December. Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet government, burdened by crisis and abandoning armed enforcement of the bloc, sent no invasion. The nations of the east made use of that opening themselves. Ballot, cut wire, crowded checkpoint and civic forum ended Europe’s division by force.